Alumni of the Month: Ugo Corte and Mari Wiklund

I am Professor of Sociology at the University of Stavanger, Norway, and I was an Erik Allardt Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies for the academic year 2017–2018. The warm feeling of companionship between fellows fostered my academic growth and continues to inspire me. I feel fortunate to have been provided with the opportunity to get to know and work with an array of talented scholars from different disciplines. A few of them have become close friends. While a part of my work is discipline-centered, working at the Collegium allowed me to think beyond my discipline, ultimately helping me to become a scholar. I cherish my time as a fellow, and I consider it a foundational step of my career. 

Additionally, Helsinki is one of my favorite cities supplying ample stimulation – the Finnish National Theatre, the Helsinki International Film Festival, the many wonderful libraries, the saunas. And every other evening after work, I would go swim at the outdoor sea pool overlooking the old city. Such a wonderful routine. A scholar's dream.

During this time, I completed a draft of my book  (University of Chicago Press, 2022), which won the Charles Horton Cooley Award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction in 2023. Among a handful of papers I finished during my fellowship, I like to mention  (2018) published by Antropologicheskij Forum/Forum for Anthropology and Culture.

While at the Collegium, I co-organized the international symposium (2018). The event resulted in the editing of a special issue of the Social Psychology Quarterly on the microsociology of creativity and creative work (2019). Additionally, I participated in the panel discussion “Managing your Career Path” held within the session “Global academia: how do career paths differ in various countries?” This event was part of the Collegium Winter School for graduate students.

My fellowship led to a tenured position as associate professor at the University of Stavanger, and while in Helsinki I designed two of the courses I currently teach there: The Sociology of Creativity, and Microsociology. 

From 2015 to 2019, I served as a Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. This period was a defining stage in my academic career, as it provided the intellectual freedom and sustained research time necessary to pursue long-term theoretical and empirical questions and to consolidate my scholarly profile.

My research at the Collegium focused on the prosody of autistic persons’ interaction, with particular attention to comprehension problems and speech disfluencies occurring in group therapy sessions. Drawing on acoustic phonetics, conversation analysis, and perception studies, I examined how prosodic features such as intonation, rhythm, pausing, and stress contribute to both mutual understanding and interactional trouble. The interdisciplinary dialogue at the Collegium played an important role in shaping my theoretical thinking and in encouraging methodological openness. Research developed during this period later formed the empirical and conceptual foundation for my first scientific monograph.

In January 2023, my monograph  was published by Springer. The book brings together conversation-analytic, acoustic, and perceptual perspectives to provide a detailed account of how prosodic organization shapes communication and understanding in autistic interaction.

I am currently a Senior University Lecturer and Docent in French language and culture at the University of Helsinki. My ongoing research continues to address prosody and interaction in autistic communication. It extends to the prosody of Finnish-speaking learners of French, as well as to prosody in spoken interaction and read-aloud speech more broadly, particularly at the interface between speech and written text and across first and second language contexts. I currently (2024–2028) lead a research project funded by the Research Council of Finland and the Emil Aaltonen Foundation, which focuses on autistic persons’ prosody from a phonetic perspective.

My forthcoming monograph, , will be published by Routledge in April 2026. Alongside research, teaching and supervision are central to my academic work, and I remain strongly committed to research-based teaching and interdisciplinary collaboration.